Scorched Power: How Trump’s 2025 Regime Turned Curriculum Control, Book Burning, Burying Information, and Expert Erasure Into America’s Most Dangerous Export

Reboot The Renaissance: Cosimo’s Secret Guardaroba is where the future is plotted, one whispered dispatch at a time.

Scorched Earth, Scorched Thought

(Definition): Scorched Power is the First Foreign Policy Built on Domestic Cultural Hatred.

(Summary): Born in the school board meeting and baptized in the federal registry, it exports bans, blacklists, and ideologies to allies abroad—not to win hearts, but to erase histories. It replaces foreign aid with fear. Trade with tests of loyalty. Embassies become censors. And diplomacy becomes denial.

Now, with the business of definitions out of the way, Scorched Power is not a tactic. It is a total strategy. A foreign policy forged from torched truths, which has no need for treaties. The battlefield has shifted—from trenches to textbooks, from missiles to collective memory. What once aimed at territory now targets thought.

This is epistemicide (the sad thing is, this word actually has been created for these times *sigh*) at scale: the systematic annihilation of knowledge infrastructure. The target is not the thing you’ve said: it’s what you’ve studied. What you’ve sourced. What you’ve preserved. What you dare to cite in defense of reality.

The crime is the curriculum. The battlefield is the classroom. And the agent is the state.

Scorched Power projects supremacy by erasure instead of what state-of-the-art arms system you added to your arsenal. It issues directives just as quickly as a swarm of drones. It rewrites syllabi instead of razing cities. It buries entire fields of study beneath policy memos soaked in ideology, paranoia, and nationalist blood and soil.

It is the deliberate eradication of knowledge infrastructures—books, data, syllabi, scholars—through bureaucratic pressure and cultural paranoia. These budget cuts are far more destructive that bombs. The information control is more total than any invasion. Its goal is not to influence what people think like Sharp Power (that we will get to), but to destroy their capacity to think at all.

The machinery of modern statecraft has been redirected. Embassies, trade attachés, USAID budgets, and intelligence briefings now chase pronouns, not proliferation. They pursue textbooks, not terrorism. This is not national defense—it is doctrinal offense.

Strategic ignorance rules. Not debate. Not dissent. Not deliberation. This is erasure masked as education reform.

“"We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself.”

— Michael Hayden, Washington Post, Apr 2018

From the Whisper Campaign to the Wildfire Doctrine: Truth Was Twisted. Then It Was Torched

Scorched Power advances with open arrogance. Sharp Power slithers through the cracks of society and its systems almost undetected. Scorched Power just crashes through the front door, brandishing discredited junk science and export cables. Winning the persuasion game is the opposite of the field it plays on, it plays on the entrances of knowledge arenas by not allowing anyone in.

Sharp Power once operated like a parasite—subtle, disguised, embedded within disinformation campaigns and meme pipelines. It swayed elections, eroded public trust, and infiltrated open systems with a sly grin and a Substack link. But Scorched Power laughs at subtlety.

Scorched Power marches. It declares foreign journalists enemies of the state. It cuts credentials, not response reels. It drafts gender policy in diplomatic cables. It walks into bilateral meetings, skipping the trade incentives, barreling straight to ideological ultimatums. It strips embassy libraries of science and fills them with creationist curriculum.

Control, not influence, is the aim. Inside the local committee meeting. Inside the archive. Inside the mind. Scorched Power does not bend the lens to their point of view—no, that requires skill, they shatter it instead. The narrative it demands is singular, sanctioned, and sealed.

Sharp Power still operated under the assumption that free societies could be nudged into submission. Scorched Power assumes submission is already deserved and it acts accordingly. What began as a Kremlin strategy has been retooled, amped up, dimensionally more dangerous as a MAGA export. Russia’s sabotage became Trump’s unbuilding strategy. What Russia distorted, Trump now declares. Openly. Proudly. Officially.

It marches under a flag of anti-facts, wages war through social policy purges like “radical free speech,” and redraws borders of belief with every redacted dataset and vanished textbook. It seeks silence for when that is achieved, breaking domestic and international law is a snap. Its capital is confusion. Its currency is fear. And its enemy is memory itself.

American diplomats once defended press freedom. In 2025, they redline visa applications based on pronouns. American foreign policy once exported expertise. Now, it exports tele-evangelism—of a stingily sleazy kind.

Scorched Power has fused culture war with foreign policy. They no longer sit in separate chambers. The front line now stretches from Tallahassee to Tbilisi. From state house to summit. From PTA to G20.

“Sharp power takes advantage of the asymmetry between free and unfree systems, allowing authoritarian regimes both to limit free expression and to distort political environments in democracies…”

— Christopher Walker, Foreign Affairs, Nov 2017

A New Geometry of Tyranny: A Cartography of Control, Redrawn in Fire

“The Curriculum Pyre” A Renaissance bonfire stacked with scrolls labeled “Science,” “History,” “Gender Studies,” and “Civics.” Trumpist clerics in crimson robes chant while a hooded youth tries to save a single unburnt scroll. The death of knowledge by decree.

Scorched Power doesn’t fit into yesterday’s categories. It demands a new compass. Force, finance, and favor once defined influence. Now, the measure is how far the repressed mind is allowed to go. The questions of knowledge now are: who holds it, who writes it, who erases it.

Power once radiated from warships and banknotes. In 2025, it radiates from spreadsheets marked “un-American” and from datasets scrubbed before dawn. The old quadrants—hard, soft, smart, sharp—no longer map the battlefield. Scorched Power is a firestorm.

Let’s redraw the grid:

Scorched Power blurs every line. It masquerades as diplomatic aid while demanding ideological submission. It arrives in the suit of a higher education consultant, but its mission is compliance. It speaks through trade envoys, but its script is censorship. It brands itself with seals and stamps, but the message is clear: approve this worldview, or lose your funding.

Pluralism is policed. Textbooks become threat assessments. University grants become tests of allegiance. Whole syllabi are ham-fistedly “Control+ F” scoured for signs of resistance. Then “Control+ R” indiscriminately. Truth is licensed to the highest bidding oligarch, but that oligarch knows all too well that if they fall out of favor, suddenly their truth will be recategorized as sedition.

“The Gagged Globe” A globe encased in chains with padlocks labeled “Censorship,” “Curriculum Edits,” and “Legislative Gags.” MAGA-red ink drips from the locks. Worldwide suppression of expertise.